A Metaphore
by seeyouontheice
Summary: People come and go. Some stay longer than others. Some begin their lives there and some finish theirs. The doctors and nurses might change, but what they did remained the same; their purpose endured.


Life may have slowed down; may have come to a halt for one reason or another as a direction and purpose keeps eluding a firm grasp. But Holby City Hospital kept on going and always would. People come and go. Some stay longer than others. Some begin their lives there and some finish theirs. The doctors and nurses might change, but what they did remained the same; their purpose endured. It was a nameless institute where the staff melded into the very fabric of the place and ceased to be connected with the outside world.

And yet they all had lives too. They all went home at the end of the day to fall, exhausted, in front of their TVs and complained about some aspect of their job to the ones who loved them. They all had their problems outside the hospital that they had to deal with and had to keep separate. But sometimes that wasn't the case. Sometime they bled into each other and things got complicated. However at the end of the day it was all forgotten because the nurses and doctors were still human too. And the people they helped understood that and allowed them to falter and crumble every now and then because it was unfair to demand them to be so uniform and so part of a majority all the time. Because what they did was provide a service that helped hundreds of people every day; a service that was – and is – invaluable.

No hospital is ever quiet because there is always someone that needs help; never no one who isn't about to die or about to fall in to respiratory arrest or about to crash after major life changing surgery. It was a wonder that some of the people who worked there had stuck around for as long as they had; a wonder why they hadn't gotten out when they could – escaped from the endless cycle of next patient, next patient, next patient ... a wonder why they didn't want to run away when something failed and went drastically wrong.

Maybe the reason so many had stayed was simply because they didn't want to leave. Maybe they felt so at home here that they didn't like the idea of moving on and starting fresh somewhere new. Perhaps they felt it would be like betraying everything they had worked for and achieved in the hospital if they left it for someplace different. There were the others, the ones who had left for one reason or another; illness and injury – not necessarily them, but maybe family members and people they cared about – and there were perhaps memories of events that had happened that they wanted to escape from, or even something better had cropped up elsewhere. They were the ones who were happy to move on, happy to start again without the familiarity of a place they knew so well – even if all hospitals were fundamentally the same – because they had never intended to stay for long in the first place. And then there were the ones who'd had no choice. The people who hadn't wanted to leave at all. The ones who, for whatever reason, gotten involved in some kind of accident or incident and come out of the situation not very well at all. They were the unfortunate ones; forever remembered by those that remained and chose to stay. They were the ones who'd died. Died doing the job that was meant to save live, not take them. It was a somewhat cruel joke, when a member of the institute died there. As if all the people they had saved and all those lives they'd made better didn't count. As if their deeds of good and great meant absolutely nothing. Because no one would expect a doctor or a nurse to fall victim to illness and injury and death; they were immune weren't they? Untouchable and unbreakable … right … but at the end of the day, they were still, just human.

No hospital would function without the numerous nurses and doctors that channelled through the various corridors and hallways. In a sense they could be called the blood of the hospital, and the corridors the arteries and veins. The walls and the structure of the building would then be the skeleton and the wards the various organs. It would make the canteen the stomach and the pharmacy the antibodies. Each part of the hospital relating to some part of the human body, all needed to function together to make the place run smoothly for as long as possible. The entrances and exits would be the lungs – doctors leaving after finishing their shifts off home to rest and nurses on their way in to start theirs, ready for the challenges ahead – where the hospital would get the vital oxygen needed to keep the blood fresh. This would mean the brain of the hospital, the part that told everyone and everything else what to do and were to go would be the CEO's office. But what, then, would be the heart. The pump that kept all of that metaphorical blood flowing round and round each day on top form. Well maybe that is the patients themselves. Each one a tiny pump to get the few nurses and doctors attending them to flow and bustle round the hospital in order to fix that person. Each one helping and challenging the hospital to find new and better and faster and more effective ways to fix people up and make them better.


End file.
